The material presented earlier indicates that the British Police during the last four decades – say from that crucial turning-point of 1966 (Waddington, 1991) – engaged in a continuous learning process regarding police use of firearms and the allied issues of rights, command, accountability, investigations and oversight. In wrestling with these complex and intertwined matters, police were driven by a number of factors that have culminated generally in a more professional and sophisticated approach.

The broader reform process in policing has not always been even, smooth and progressive, but rather has often been tardy, painful, contested and even at times retrograde. There have, for example, been highly critical moments eliciting considerable negative publicity with insistent demands for reform arising from major corruption scandals, miscarriages of justice, public order situations including the 1981 riots in Brixton and elsewhere, and from the profound repercussions of the murder of Stephen Lawrence. There can be no doubt, however, that policing has altered considerably in a number of areas and is continually subject to change and reform (Blair, 2003; Reiner, 2010).

Behind a number of these changes are several streams of influence combining to push the police to concentrate their minds on command, accountability, investigations and oversight (Jones, 2003). Here I shall touch on five key factors. The growing importance of human rights (HR) law and the pronouncements of the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR); the potential impact from the late 1990s of the proposed legislation on ‘corporate manslaughter’; influential court cases and judicial pronouncements on police firearms use; developments in structures and practices of operational command and control; and problems with investigations and the rise of new oversight agencies.

Indeed, behind these particular impulses the police have been subjected in the last three decades more generally to a swelling stream of commissions, directives on procedures and legislation, which has cascaded onto them from both Conservative and Labour governments (Reiner, 2010). Under the New Labour government from 1997, for instance, there was a flood of measures: ‘During its first ten years in office New Labour passed fifty-three Acts containing criminal justice legislation and created 3,000 new or revised criminal offences’ (Blair, 2009: 105).